DA Bragg Wants Us To Believe His Pursuit of Trump Isn’t Political

As New York prepares to put the 45th president of America on trial, the Associated Press is out with a story it headlines as “Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says Trump’s hush money criminal trial isn’t about politics.” Go ahead, kid me. Reminds us of the bridge at Brooklyn that can be picked up for a song. There’s not a sentient New Yorker who believes that this case isn’t about politics.Mr. Bragg contends that the accusations against Mr. Trump — that he “falsified business records,” as the AP puts it, to reimburse a lawyer, Michael Cohen for, in effect, hush money payments — are a run of the mill matter. “At its core, this case today is one with allegations like so many of our white collar cases,” Mr. Bragg has said. “Someone lied again and again to protect their interests and evade the laws to which we are all held accountable.”That attempt to gloss over the extraordinary prosecution of a candidate for the White House is of a piece, the AP contends, with Mr. Bragg’s “efforts to portray himself as apolitical.” Yet even before he acceded to the office of district attorney, Mr. Bragg had Mr. Trump in his sights. He won his party’s nomination in part by boasting during the primary that he’d “sued Mr. Trump’s administration,” the Times reported, “more than a hundred times.”As a candidate in 2020 for DA, Mr. Bragg spoke of a “staggering” number of cases “swirling” around Mr. Trump and said the “matter involving” Michael Cohen “stood out.” The candidate noted that “presumably, the evidence is there,” even as he pledged not to “prejudge” the matter. Yet “if they’ve already said it in a charging instrument,” he contended, “I presume it could be, you know, accurate and charge ready.”So much for the presumption of innocence.“I have investigated Trump and his children and held them accountable for their misconduct with the Trump Foundation,” Mr. Bragg crowed during a candidate forum late in 2020. He wanted voters to know, he said, that “I know how to follow the facts and hold people in power accountable.” With comments like this, did Mr. Bragg breach the ethics of his office by in effect running on a platform to prosecute Mr. Trump?At least one scholar of prosecutorial misbehavior, Bennett Gershman, has written that such law enforcement officials have, in his terms, a “duty of silence,” and should avoid “comments about specific cases,” including about “evidence and the defendant’s character” — especially as a candidate for office. “Such statements have the capacity to prejudice future criminal proceedings,” Mr. Gershman explains, and “a prosecutor has to be most careful.”That caution appears to have been thrown to the wind by Candidate Bragg. Worse, the charges themselves have been mocked as a “Zombie Case,” as Reuters put it, because Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, “twice looked into the hush money payment and did not bring charges.” That was “in part because winning a conviction would rely on untested legal strategies,” Reuters reported, citing an ex-prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz.Plus, Mr. Vance was at the end of his career as a prosecutor. Even after Mr. Bragg plowed ahead, Mr. Vance offered some words of caution, noting that Cohen’s federal prosecution was “one reason why we didn’t move forward.” Mr. Vance added that “there are novel issues around using the false statements statute in connection with committing a crime that violates federal election laws.” Mr. Vance called it one reason “that caused us to think carefully.”“It seems a bit of a legal reach,” law professor Jonathan Turley told the AP of Mr. Bragg’s case, suggesting that it wouldn’t have been filed “if the defendant was not Donald Trump.” That echoes the warning to prosecutors by FDR’s attorney general, Robert Jackson, against “picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.” In other words, mounting a political prosecution.

DA Bragg Wants Us To Believe His Pursuit of Trump Isn’t Political

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